Like the solar system, the weather was one other subject I decided to introduce to my son to last year. All others (besides reading and math) were child-initiated. For this, I mostly relied on books from the library and our own book collection (see below for list of books). For our initial lesson, I stuck to an easy topic: the water cycle.

I don’t do this often, but I printed out some coloring pages for the boys about the water cycle at Kid Zone Science (scroll to bottom of page for links to worksheets). If I use worksheets and coloring pages sparingly, the boys seem to like it. (In general, they have not liked coloring books or drawing with crayons very much, but it does happen occasionally.)

After explaining the water cycle to my then five-year-old, we boiled some water on the stove and watched the steam rise: water vapor! Then I took a glass of ice water and held it over the steam until it started to condense: rain!

We also made a weather chart, and we kept track of the weather for one week. My son wanted to make another chart and keep going.

{Unfortunately, that never happened, and as we were studying clouds, I began to take pictures of cloud formations and had the idea to make a chart about that. Again, this didn’t happen. Maybe it will someday, or maybe it won’t. That’s okay. Now I’ll leave it up to my son to continue his study of the weather.}

Again, at the time, my son began to get interested in the weather, specifically about hurricanes and tornadoes. He checked out several books on these topics at the library and wanted me to read them to him. I also let him watch some footage about hurricanes on YouTube, and now he definitely doesn’t want to be in one! (You’ll have to decide what is age-appropriate viewing for your child. My son seems to look at natural phenomena with a scientific mind, and they don’t scare him as much as it would have scared me as a child.)

After his pre-K graduation last spring, my mother-in-law wanted to get him a gift for a congratulatory present. He asked for a weather station! It was on our back deck rail for quite a while until our new dog chewed it to bits. :( My son liked checking the temperature and rain level everyday, so I may get him a better thermometer and rain gauge at some point.

As you can see, all of my lessons are pretty easy. I don’t rely on a curriculum. I pick topics I think I should cover (that he would like) from a typical course of study for his age range. I use library books, YouTube, worksheets if they seem to help, and then I let serendipity take its course.

Having a brief lesson at home has helped my son understand and process these topics when we’ve found other ways to learn about them: in his classes, at the museum, on T.V. or new books that might otherwise not have gained his attention.

Teaching this way has not been a stress on me, and so far, I haven’t lost my child’s interest in learning, which is most important to me!

Here’s a list of books my son has enjoyed listening to me read:

Hurricanes, Simon, Seymour

Hurricanes! Gibbons, Gail

Tornadoes, Simon, Seymour

Scholastic’s The magic school bus wet all over : a book about the water cycle, Relf, Patricia

My philosophy is to introduce the topic to them and then let it go where it may. They may not take it any farther. They may want more information. Or maybe they won’t seem interested, but a few months later, they’ll see something that makes them remember what you taught them, and they’ll have more questions about it.

I was also prompted to teach my son about the solar system because my step-mother told me she got him A Moon In My Room for a birthday gift. I didn’t think he would completely understand what it was unless I gave him some reference for it. I think he was about four-years-old when we did this.

Prior to my lesson, the only introduction he had to outer space were the few episodes on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in which Mickey and his friends take a trip into space. I think that helped him.

For my initial lesson, all I did was print some graphics off the Internet and laminate them, and I also used a box of space cards I had picked up for $1 at Target. (Found a bunch of those in their dollar section once, and they have proved useful!)

It’s been a long time, so I’m afraid I cannot remember the exact words I used to tell my son about the solar system. We refer to our globe frequently, and since he had seen Micky fly into the outer space, it wasn’t hard for him to grasp.

I laid the cards on the ground with the sun in the middle, and then I put the planet cards around it in order. Then we walked around the sun card just like the planets orbit the sun, and we may have read a bit about the planets and space on the backs of the cards.

Little did I know, this would spark an interest in the solar system for my son. He asked questions, wanted to check out many library books, and (much later) came up with his own project! See below.

Following my short and sweet lesson, my son’s knowledge about the solar system has been increasing in a long and meandering way. (See Learning is like a Chain Link Fence.). We’ve done the following:

Checked books out from the library. There was a time all my son wanted to do what look at books about the planets.

Looked up question(s) on the Internet. I think once my son wanted to know what was inside Jupiter.

We happened to get bonus lessons about the solar system in my son’s knee-high naturalist class, and we got to go into their star dome. (And now we can’t wait to visit their new planetarium! We have visited it, and it’s awesome!)

We’ve taken nighttime walks and gazed at the stars. We also bought a telescope for him at his request for Christmas, but *ahem* we don’t really know how to use it yet.

Now the subject doesn’t come up much, but occasionally I’ll send him an e-mail about space exploration, if I think he’ll like it. (The Curiosity Rover on Mars is providing some interesting photographs!)

I’ve saved the best for last. Last year out of the blue, my son thought it would be a good idea to make the planets out of paper and hang them along a doorway of our activity room. They are still hanging there. This summer when my mother-in-law came to visit, my son could point to each paper planet and name them from memory.

Learning about something as vast as the solar system is most certainly a subject one could spend a lifetime on. I don’t know if my son will continue to explore astronomy, but he has certainly made that first link in his chain of learning.

{Update January 2013: My son has continued to learn about the solar system and space exploration in a variety of ways, and recently he has had an interest in rockets! First, he asked for a rocket for Christmas, and he got a small set of all the U.S. rockets. Then, we started a rocket project, but I’m not sure where it’s going to go. We’ve read more books (just go to your library!), and right now we’re watching The Planets, a series about space on Netflix. There’s also a series on the space missions, which we’re planning to watch. He also enjoyed watching this video of a tour of the international space station.}

Sophie - She has taught both my boys about being gentle and caring for animals.

My last homeschool priority for my children is teaching responsibility. Obviously this is something that will have to be taught over the long-haul, and I’m always looking for ideas on character building. If anyone has any suggestions in this area, especially for youngsters, I’d love for you to contribute your ideas in the comments section.

I’ve tried different things to instill a sense of responsibility in my five-year-old. Some of them I continue to do, but there is one that didn’t stick:

I created a sticker board for him, and across the top, I wrote various things that I expected him to do during the day, such as his reading and math lessons, helping to take care of his baby brother, playing, and helping to clean. If he did that during the day, he’d get a sticker for it. Some of what I put down as his “responsibilities” were easy for him because I didn’t want to make all of them chores, and I wanted to show him that working is just as important as taking time to play. We used this sticker board for a while, and he really liked it, but unfortunately, we started to forget about it and eventually I abandoned it altogether. In addition, I didn’t like the idea of rewarding him with stickers all the time. It wasn’t a big deal after awhile. However, I do think it served an important purpose: it got him to realize that I expect certain things from him, and he seems more willing to “step up to the plate” when I ask him to do something.

Here are a few other things I’ve done to (hopefully) instill a sense of responsibility:

After I abandoned the sticker board, I created a sheet in which I listed everyone’s responsibilities in house. I made three columns (and a short one for the two-year-old on the bottom), and I listed every chore that each of us do to “maintain and take care of our home.” I often tell my son that this house is our only home, and it’s our responsibility to take care of it.I believe that writing this out and going over it with him has helped him see the “big picture” and begin to understand the roles each of us play in making a home. (I don’t expect him to remember all this. It’s a just a beginning.) So, for example, I wrote:

Daddy: Works full-time to make money to pay for the house, food, clothes, etc. Takes out garbage and takes care of pets, including fish tank. Makes repairs, mows the grass, takes care of cars, gives five-year-old a shower every night. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Five-year-old: Here I listed what I expected of him, including helping to clean, take care of his younger brother, feed the cat, and do what mommy and daddy asks.

Two-year-old: Help clean toys, help take care of his older brother, and do what mommy and daddy asks.

I have picked a few small chores for him to do to help me around the house. I only picked things that I thought he and I could both stick to. And luckily I picked right because I always make him do these things:

Help pick up toys. If there’s a lot of toys out, he knows that he has to put them back before he can get another box out from the closet.

Feed the cat. We are lucky that we have a cat with will power. We only have to fill up her bowl every few days. When I notice that it’s empty, I tell my son to fill it up.

Take his used plate/bowl/cup after meal times and put them on the kitchen counter.

On cleaning days (Mondays), he knows he has to help do some “big” cleaning, and I usually let him chose what he wants to help with. (Except for picking up the toys. He has to help with that.) Right now he likes vacuuming under the sofa cushions. That’s a big help!

After he and his brother help me clean on Monday mornings, he knows that he needs to play and keep his brother occupied while I continue cleaning. (This doesn’t always go as well as I might hope.) I do reward him for this help on Mondays by having “Monday Movie night.” (I get this reward too, and I’ll write more about that in another post.)

I think the biggest way I teach responsibility is just by talking and making gentle reminders (Daddy does this too):

I always explain to my five-year-old that we’re a family, so we help take care of each other. Since he’s the older brother, he’ll need to help his brother more, but as the 2-year-old gets older, they’ll be able to help each other more and more. Occasionally my two-year-old will give his older brother his morning juice that I set on the counter in the morning, or he’ll go get him a spoon from the silverware drawer. Whenever he does this, I say, “See, he’s already helping you too!”

I don’t hesitate to tell him how much things cost or when we can or cannot afford to buy something. I tell him we need to save our money for certain things. I remind him that in our home, daddy goes to work in order to make the money we live on. (I also tell him that in some families, the mommy works.)

When we’re outside, I emphasize that it’s our job to take care of the plants and animals. I try not to let him hurt worms or bugs needlessly. (Although I admit I do kill bugs that get inside the house.)

So that is a little of what I do, but I have to say for my five-year-old, being an older brother is probably the number one opportunity to teach him responsibility. Everyday I see small actions he takes to help care for his brother, and I think he does it out of his own love for his little brother. It’s wonderful to watch. Will it take a little more creativity on my part to instill a sense of responsibility on his younger brother? I guess we’ll see how this all plays out!

Thanks so much for reading about my homeschool priorities! Please stay tuned because I’m going to write about the formal lessons I do with my five-year-0ld, some activities we’ve been working on, and I need to post some recent columns too!

Now give me those ideas (or children’s books?) that might help with building character and a sense of responsibility.

My fifth homeschool priority for my children (at any age) is to spend quality, stress-free time together. For the purpose of this blog post, I’m mostly referring to the time I spend with my boys during the week while daddy is at work. Making time for the whole family is another priority, but it’s not hard to manage that, so for now I’ll simply refer to our daily routine.

This is an ongoing goal, and with the ebb and flow of life, it doesn’t always happen. I try to pace our schedule so that we have plenty of time at home to play, but inevitably there will be weeks when it seems like we’re going somewhere everyday! It’s very easy to do this. Consider:

not to mention: visits to grandpa’s house, the occasional doctor’s appointment, more errands that need doing, & library visits, which don’t happen enough.

You get the picture! I could easily fill our days with places to go.

In addition, with young children, I cannot leave the house more than once a day. Did I mention we live 20~30 minutes from the nearest grocery store? Yeah. That doesn’t help either. The two-year-old still needs a nap in the afternoon. And sometimes I do too!

Weekly Schedules~

Life can be hectic sometimes, but when it does, I simply stop planning things to do and take time off. I’m a homebody at heart, so it’s in my blood to hang out at home. I don’t need to be on the go all the time, but I do need a balance between being social and having time at home.

I’ve also learned what works for us and what doesn’t. My eldest son seems more comfortable with one friend his age instead of in a large group. I used to worry about trying to get involved in some kind of regular homeschooling group, but now I don’t. Right now, we don’t need that. I admit that I feel I lose out on connections that way. I would like to have a wider circle of mama friends to talk to regularly, and I’ve met some really cool women that I’d like to get to know better, but in the end, I know I have to do what’s best for my boys.

We’ve met some boys his age, and I try to schedule a play date with one of them at least every other week, if not every week. This doesn’t always happen because kids get sick and unexpected things pop up, but that’s my goal anyway.

Quality Time~

When we are home, I try to be mindful about spending quality time with the boys. I have a lot to do around the house, and I have personal goals (like this blog) to keep me distracted, but I’ve put in place a daily schedule that makes it easier for me to know that I have spent quality time throughout the day with the boys. I may write more about our specific daily and weekly routines in the future, but for now I’ll just say:

In the morning after breakfast, we have together time, which begins with book time. We each pick one book to read, and sometimes we read more, if we feel like it.. (Since the boys tend to pick the same books over and over this is the best method I have found to make them happy while also making sure they get to read a variety of books. Not to mention keep my brain from atrophying!)

After book time, we usually do puppet shows, but I don’t push it. The past few mornings my eldest son has been wanting to build things with popsicle sticks, and this morning we painted our creations! So as you can see, if the boys are playing well together or occupied in another productive activity, I go with the flow.

And that’s another way I try to create stress-free, quality time….I go with the flow. Usually it’s best if I just toss my agenda out the window. Now that my five-year-old is getting older and more imaginative, he is full of ideas, and many of them are excellent, productive ideas! How can I stop that?

On the flip side, there are days that seem aimless, and if the boys want me to play play play with toys and games that never seem to end, I can feel my patience and enthusiasm waning. I’m not saying that their play is bad. No, it’s great. It’s just not always what this 40-year-old mama wants to be doing. So if I can kind of steer their day, it helps me stay enthusiastic, gives us plenty of time together which in turns gives me a chance to say, “Now you guys go upstairs and play by yourselves for a little while.” If I have put in my quality time, I don’t feel guilty about making them play without me. And it’s good for them too!

I’m also trying be more mindful of the time I spend with my boys. I’m very much influenced by the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, and I think parenting is wonderful opportunity to practice mindfulness. (If you want to read more about this, I highly recommend the book Buddhism for Mothers of Young Children by Sarah Napthali. You don’t have to be Buddhist to get something out of her book.)

As time goes by, I am finding it much easier to let the rest of the world slide by, forget about all the things I want to do, and just soak up my children. You are two-years-old, and you have the cutest smile. You are five-years-old, and I love listening to you talk and explain your magical world to me. I put off things that I have to do, and guess what? It gets done anyway.

Simply put, it takes practice to be a mother, and I guess I’m getting better at it.

This is a topic that I could go on and on about, but I’d rather hear from you. How do you ensure that you’ll spend quality time with your children when life pulls us along at such a high speed?

I have always loved nature. I was lucky to have parents who enjoyed getting out into nature, and with them, I’ve traveled to many national parks in the U.S. My dad loved boating, so we were often on a lake on weekends too.

My husband grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and he and his friends would play in an alleyway. He said one of their neighbors would be enraged if any of the kids stepped one foot onto the small square of grass that was his front yard. Fortunately, I had a nice yard as a child, although I have done my fair share of living in apartments too.

Anyway, my husband and I both fell in love with our yard before we fell in love with the house, although we love it too. We have less than an acre, but it’s still big by our standards, and it has woods with a variety of trees. So our nature and exploration starts in our own yard.

Here are some simple things I do to let my boys explore and appreciate nature:

Most importantly, I hope that I impart the wisdom to respect and take care of nature and be very careful with it. We follow my son’s knee-high naturalist teacher’s advice when turning over rocks and large branches. Pull it towards you. If there’s an animal under it, doing this will allow that animal an escape route. It will also keep you safe!

I used to be wary of letting the boys play with sticks, but then I saw this Ted Talk by Gever Tulley, and it gave me a different perspective. So I give firm rules about playing with sticks. (And I keep my eyes on them like glue!) They can’t get too close to each other when they have a stick, and if they don’t follow this rule, the sticks have to be put down.

Once I needed to channel their energy and the stick toting, so with some fast thinking, I started making this little “shelter,” and the boys helped me gather the sticks and build it.

But wait. I didn’t mean for “Exploration” to only imply exploration of nature. I let my boys explore everything as long as it’s safe to do so. When my five-year-old asks me questions about the human body, I get a book about the human body, a human body model and we also look online. We explore his questions.

When my two-year-old wants to get into the cupboards, I lock the ones that aren’t safe, and I allow him to crawl into the other ones, pull out the pots, bowls, and whatever else might be in there. I let him explore the world around him.

My husband and I have taken our boys to museums, aquariums, zoos, parks, and wildlife areas as much as we can. Together we explore what’s out there.

I don’t consider myself an expert on kids; I’m learning this as I go.But if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that kids need freedom to explore, and they need nature. Even if it’s just a small park with some grass they can roll around in. But my hope for all children is that they can have the whole world.

I could go on and on about this subject, but I would like to hear from you. Please tell me what you do to encourage your children to explore the world and get into nature.

My first priorities for my sons at the ages of 5 and 2 are: imagination, play, motion and literature.

I grouped imagination/play/motion together because they go hand and hand. At five-years-old, my son is using his tremendous imagination constantly. The two-year-old is quite adept at it too. Playing is their number one job. Right now as I type this, the five-year-old is upstairs with all his stuffed animals. He has arranged them “just so” on his bed, and he says he’s keeping them warm.

He runs up and down the hallway, and he pretends he’s a horse. He “flies” toys around the house. Outside, he’ll find a strand of wild onion, tell me it’s an “eel” and then go feed it “ants.”

I’m thrilled to see that at five- and two-years-old, my boys are beginning to play together well, creating forts and pretending to be dinosaurs or ocean animals. (This is also a big relief to me because I’m getting a little more free time to myself.)

Rough and tumble play is a frequent activity in our house. My boys are always moving, always pretending, and I don’t want to discourage that. There is clear evidence that children learn through play. In addition, authors Michael Gurian (The Wonder of Boys) and Steve Biddulph (Raising Boys) both write about how important it is for boys to have plenty of space, and they need to move their bodies.

Biddulph writes in Raising Boys, “Sitting still at a desk for a long time is usually hard and painful for boys (and some girls too). In early primary school, boys (whose motor nerves are still growing) actually get signals from their body saying, ‘Move around. Use me.’ To a stressed-out first grade teacher, this looks like misbehavior.” (This is in a section titled “Starting School: Why Boys Should Start Later.”)

We read books often. If we’re not going anywhere, I have “book time” with both my boys in the mornings, and then we (my husband and I each take one child) usually read one book at bedtime with the five-year-old and look through several picture books with the two-year-old. We go to the library too, but I’m lucky to have quite a nice collection of children’s books through library sales, so I find we have long stretches of time when we don’t go to the library because we’re busy with other things.

We read storybooks as well as non-fiction. My five-year-old is very fond of science books about bugs, snakes, the earth or whatnot.

For a long time, I wanted to incorporate another way to foster make-believe with both my boys that I could easily participate in. I also wanted to create some kind of morning ritual with them. I wasn’t sure how to do this. I started “book time” but I wanted more than that. Then one morning my five-year-old pulled down the finger puppets that were sitting on the top of my bookshelf in the living room. (They had been there untouched for a long time.) He wanted to do a puppet show.

And that was the beginning of our morning puppet shows. We all take turns putting on a play, and even my two-year-old will get behind the love seat and put on his own puppet show! How cool is that?

We don’t do a puppet show every morning. If we are going somewhere, or if the boys are playing nicely together, I don’t push it, but I do encourage it and ask for a puppet show on a regular basis. My puppet shows are another outlet for me to impart some wisdom, though mostly I entertain. (Once I even let their toy alligator try to eat the puppets. It’s nice for me to have an outlet to do “boy stuff” in a way that suits my energy level. Afterall, I’m a forty-year-old girl who likes to sit in one place!)

My future goals: In the near future, I hope we can find an art class for the five-year-old. Long term goals: some kind of art study, music study, and/or creating more elaborate puppet shows. I’d like to make some puppets or make a puppet stage.

What do you do to stimulate your child’s imagination? And please come back. I’ll continue to go over my homeschool priorities in detail.

In the article, the parents homeschooled their children in the early years, but they did not follow any academic standards. They lived outside the U.S., but later they moved back and both parents got full-time jobs, so they put their children into public school. At that time, the kids were unprepared academically or socially for the school environment.

The children in that article are adults now and seem fine, though I think it’s unfortunate that many people may read it and acquire a negative opinion of homeschooling. I think the article had more to say about that particular family than about homeschooling in general.

But it brought the question to my mind that I mentioned above. What am I preparing my children for? This is a question that all parents should ask themselves whether they homeschool or not.

For homeschoolers, it is important to consider whether or not you will put your children into public school at some point because homeschooling until middle school may look very different than homeschooling until college.

I experienced a very different culture in middle and high school than I ever did after I graduated. After graduating from high school, I was able to make my own choices, and I put myself where and with whom I wanted to be.

Homeschooled kids will be different because of their different experiences, and though different can be quite good, depending on their age and maturity, they may not be ready to enter the world of peer pressure. In my research I have mostly read about the success of homeschooled students entering public school, but parents do need to think about this and make sure their children are ready to enter public school.

On a broader level, I am asking myself this question because whether I homeschool for a few years or all the way through high school, I know I want to prepare my kids for more than what a typical public school education would give them. All parents do this to a certain degree: School prepares them for academics. Parents prepare them for life.

But do we? There are many students entering college or graduating from college, but they know little to nothing about how to manage daily life. Why is it such a shock to young people when suddenly they are on their own and they have to cook, clean and pay the bills? Should we blame it all on immaturity? I think parents could do a better job of preparing their kids, and it should start when they’re young.

Whether or not I’ll be able to succeed in teaching my children academics and how to live a happy, productive life remains to be seen. But as I go about planning their education at home, I want to consider what their needs will be for their Whole Life, and by “whole” I mean all aspects of their lives: home life, vocations, finances, and spiritual lives, i.e. how to handle failure, how to relax, and how to be productive in this life. That might sound high minded, but when it comes to my children, I’m not aiming low.

I want to teach my children how to manage a household and take care of their basic needs. They’ll learn to cook, clean and do laundry. I don’t understand parents who don’t make their kids do chores even in the name of “they need more time to study.” When I was in Japan, I learned that their schools did not have janitors. The students cleaned the schools! Twenty minutes a day was devoted to cleaning and taking out trash.

I’ll also teach them about money management, and depending on their age and ability, I’ll let them know exactly where we stand as a household in money matters. I already tell my five-year-old when something is too expensive for us to buy, and when I say that, he doesn’t pester me for it again.

Financial literacy is so important that it should be taught in high school. Kids are signing up for college loans that they may or may not be able to pay back, and it saddens me to know people who have made such bad financial decisions that they’ve created a lifetime worth of debt.

We expect kids to go to school and learn how to read, write, do math, and know some history, yet they enter the world without a clue about how to manage daily life. There is more to life than what schools are teaching our kids, and it’s the parent’s job to fill in those gaps. Whether homeschooling or not, we need to think about what we’re preparing our children for and give them the tools to lead balanced, happy lives.

I feel it’s important for me to define “child-led learning” as it works for my family because I’m sure there are different variations of child-led learning in each family who choose this way of homeschooling. (I think that’s great because every parent has to determine what works best for his or her child.) Unfortunately, people hear the term “child-led learning” and often come up with their own judgment about it based on an arbitrary news report, article or a homeschool family they have met. I think it’s wiser to hold off on our judgments until we know more about that family and the needs of the children.

For me, doing “child-led learning” means introducing my boys to a variety of ideas, subjects, books, places, classes, stories, and people. I am a facilitator and mentor. As we explore the world together, I’m going to observe what they love the most. When they gain interest in a particular subject, I’m going to let them delve into it further, and I’m going to do everything I can to help them learn more about it until they are satisfied. I expect some interests may peter out and others may be life-long passions.

I am going to make sure my children learn the basics: reading, language arts, math, science and social studies. In fact, according to the law in Georgia (U.S.A.), I have to, but I do believe that each child may learn at a different pace. I will nudge, but I will not push. If I nudge I can tell whether or not my child is ready for a specific subject by his reaction to it. I’m not going to force anything, and I’m not going to test (except when the state requires it). If I can find ways of helping them learn difficult subjects, I’ll do that, butI think it’s useless to make a child learn something he or she isn’t ready for or doesn’t want to learn.

I will also concentrate more on helping my children how to find answers to their questions, fostering their imaginations, and helping them learn how to manage daily life. I’ll write more about this in future posts.

As an example of encouraging my son’s passions, I am currently working on a snake project with my five-year-old. I am not interested in snakes, but he is, so I suggested we make a book about snakes. He loved the idea. Through this project, we are working on his research, writing and reading skills. It’s also part of his science requirement. If I can think of other ways to teach him basic skills through his love of snakes, I’ll do it. For example, we might use a measuring tape to see what the length of a snake is. In addition, (at my son’s request) snakes are always characters in our nightly stories.

I should also mention that occasionally I will make my children do something. This goes back to my statement above when I said that I would introduce “my boys to a variety of books, places, classes, stories, and people.” For example, the nature center we go to frequently is offering an after-Christmas mini-camp. I know he will love this! But when I asked him if wanted to go, he said “No.” I know that he just doesn’t understand what a mini-camp is, so I decided that if we could get in, I’d make him try it. Fortunately, after I took the time to explain what it was about more thoroughly, he wanted to go. If he tries it and hates it, we’ll reassess, but trying is a must.

There are other things that will be required of my boys like contributing to the care of the house and each other, but I hope to approach this in a manner so that they understand the value of it and want to do it. I will write more about this in future posts as well.

What is your perceived definition of child-led learning? Do you think it’s good or bad?

Note: This column appeared in the November 9, 2011 print edition of the Barrow Journal. Almost two years ago I also wrote a column about the importance of playing make-believe and the research on how it teaches self-regulation to children. You can read that column by clicking here.

Sometimes I’ll get the question: “How’s homeschooling going?” and I get a little taken aback because I feel as if I should answer: “It’s great! We’re doing reading, math, science, art and going on lots of field trips!” At least, that’s what I think people want to hear. After all, if my child were in Kindergarten, he would be getting a daily dose of the above.

Truth be told, though we do a little of that stuff, and I’ve written about it in my columns, my main directive for my kids is “Go play.”Because when I consider what the most important mission of a five- and two-year-old should be, it’s PLAY!

Play is one of the main reasons I am homeschooling in the first place. I don’t want my children to have to spend their day at school and then have most of their evening hours consumed by doing homework, eating dinner, taking a bath and going to bed early because they have to get up early the next morning to go to school.

I’m not saying that schoolchildren don’t play, but I do think that play is at a lower priority when we have to stick to schedules and get homework done. And from what I hear, Kindergarteners are not excluded from these pressures anymore.

It does not say that all activities or after-school programs are bad for children. In fact, they have clear benefits. But it does say “…the balance that needs to be achieved will be different for every child on the basis of the child’s academic needs, temperament, environment, and the family’s needs.”

As I watch my boys grow and my eldest nears his elementary years, I increasingly feel that he needs the right balance between structured activity, academics and playtime. Playtime should take up a much higher percentage of his time.

In “The Case for Play,” Tom Bartlett describes several researchers attempts to bring old-fashioned play back into children’s lives.

He explains that these researchers believe: “The emphasis on standardized testing, on attempting to constantly monitor, measure, and quantify what students learn, has forced teachers to spend more of the school day engaged in so-called direct instruction and has substantially reduced or eliminated opportunities that children have for exploring, interacting, and learning on their own.”

I want to homeschool for exactly those reasons cited above: so that my children can explore, interact and learn on their own.

In a wonderful New York Times opinion piece titled “Play to Learn,” Susan Engel lists what an ideal classroom daily schedule would entail for a third-grade class. Besides being immersed in storytelling, reading, discussion, practicing computation and giving the children a chance to devise original experiments (just to name a few), they would also have extended time to play.

She writes, “Research has shown unequivocally that children learn best when they are interested in the material or activity they are learning. Play — from building contraptions to enacting stories to inventing games — can allow children to satisfy their curiosity about the things that interest them in their own way. It can also help them acquire higher-order thinking skills, like generating testable hypotheses, imagining situations from someone else’s perspective and thinking of alternate solutions.”

Reading this makes me very excited about homeschooling because this is the kind of school I want to create. At home, I can teach my children the basics without drilling them or making them work on assignments they have no interest in. I can give them hours of leisure time to play, or I can plan some outings and interesting projects that they’ll enjoy.

Reading the latest research on play has renewed my enthusiasm for teaching my son and has reminded me to keep asking him questions, engage him in conversation, and, most importantly, encourage him to create his own make-believe world.

Susan Engel also writes, “Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.”

At five-years-old, spending time and money worrying about a curriculum should not be on my to-do list for my son. Instead I should be outside toting sticks and playing with him.